On Stage

...Chaikin, portraying Vanya with deliberate understatement, had a tendency to fade away completely, yet at times he very convincingly expressed the character's bitter impotence...

...and of f to the side, looking very small under a balcony, a table lit by candles in holders appropriate to the period and covered with plates of cookies, bottles and a probably Russian samovar...

...After a period of moaning about his poor health to win the sympathy, and pampering, of his spouse, he regains all his customary arrogance and announces his intention to sell the place and use the proceeds to buy a villa in Finland...

...It is difficult to judge actors who were constantly hampered by having to wander around in a meaningless wasteland or sprint along narrow catwalks...

...The designations can be confusing...

...Perhaps it would be wrong to call him a misfit, since he eventually becomes more or less adjusted to himself...

...Vanya fires two pistol shots at his brother-in-law...

...Astrov, distressed by the steady depletion of the woods in his native land, asks, "Why do we have to destroy whole forests...

...Astrov is enamored of the Russian countryside and in love with Yelyena, while Sonya is in love with him...

...It is a highly intellectual, and at the same time intellectually limited analysis of the workings of totalitarianism...

...Love and Money triumph as all ends well...

...Chaikin and van Itallie are both veterans of Judith Malina and Julian Beck's now dead Living Theater troupe...

...Uncle and niece sit down together in one of Loquasto's small wooden trenches, and there we leave them, bent over the same worn accounting books they have been studying for years...

...James Cahill, as Serebryakov, was the worst puppet in Serban's hand...

...The twist is that in order to inherit the family fortune-which, in an attempt to be funny or biting or something, is said to include New York's Central Park and all of Wyoming-cotty must prove himself a flawless "preppy" at 21 (the age, not the restaurant...

...A villain is brought onto the scene for our hissing pleasure, but Cotty, after a few very unconvincing dabblings with revolt, manages to circumvent him and pocket the park and the state-plus the riches that will be handed down to his s weetfteart Angelica Livermore Atwat-er, known as Muffy...

...On Stage OFF THE BROADWAY TRACK BY LEO SAUVAGE The new season remained largely dormant last month, so it seemed a good time to survey the numerous New York theaters that-by virtue of their distance from and philosophical differences with the Great White Way?are referred to as either "Off or "Off-Off Broadway...

...The Annex production of Uncle Vanya, with Andrei Serban as director, Jean-Claude van Itallie as author of the "New English Version" and Joseph Chaikin performing the title role, closed on October 2. Nonetheless, the radical treatment of the play and the reputations of the participants make this an event worth discussing...

...Besides the northerly location, the lovely house's Off status is confirmed by the fact that it was used as a Mormon church in the 1920s and later became the ballroom of the famous Manhattan Towers Hotel...

...If I save for last the three short plays of Samuel Beckett that have been beautifully staged by Alan Schneider at the Harold Clurman Theater on far West 42nd Street, it is because I had trouble writing about them without sounding insensitive, inordinately ecstatic or condescending...

...A La Mama evening quite often has no author and no play, only a gimmick...

...For all the references to the garden, we did not see a single spot of green...

...And Frances Conroy's Sonya-despite having to roam about so much at the director's command that she sometimes seemed to be sleepwalking-managed to transmit a muted concentration of despair that was quite impressive...

...The current show at the Promenade is a "new musical" called Preppies, clearly written for either a very young or a very nostalgic audience...

...four or five chairs isolated from one another and from everything else...

...Sonya remains alone with Vanya, who is also dreaming of Yelyena...

...He started getting us involved in Uncle Vanya by destroying the location...

...Designed and lit with eminent artistry by Mark D. Malamud, and flawlessly performed by a very great actor, David Warrilow, it is a tremendously fascinating dramatic exercise, but no more...

...On the other hand, there was lots of wood...

...Dedicated to Vaclav Havel, one of the more famous victims of Prague's deadening winter, it demonstrates how a helpless humanity?whose silent suffering Warrilow symbolizes in an absolutely extraordinary performance-can be manipulated by an almighty Commissar without the aid of a Yogi...

...His perverse stubbornness about starting of f on the left foot had a similarly crushing, or more precisely scattering effect on Uncle Vanya...

...I also liked Diane Venora as the decidedly undecided Yelyena...

...If the Upper West Side is far enough from Shubert Alley to be considered Of f Broadway, the producers there should feel free enough to risk looking for a vehicle that is not as unadventurous as anything we might see midtown...

...Serban said he wished to "involve the public" in his presentation, the favorite cliche of directors who in the name of experimentation concentrate on scorning, or at best confusing, the spectators...

...Set designer Santo Loquasto turned in asolid carpentry job, building a long rectangle of large planks, dividing it into several sections of various sizes and elevating them to different levels...

...he returns to his work, and occasionally to the bottle...

...Vanya is a conspicuously colorless fellow who does not expect much from life, for even though he can't help dreaming of change, he is unable to conceive any way of achieving it...

...At 47, he pursues the same routine that has occupied most of his adult life: the devoted and seemingly competent management of the big house and garden he assumes will one day be inherited by his niece Sonya, the lonely daughter of his deceased sister...

...The Promenade Theater, for instance, happens to front directly on Broadway, but at 76th Street...

...Each of the works is in its own way a perfect example of the contribution -magnificent, albeit not without its objectionable elements-beckett has made to the Theater with a capital T. The opening piece is entitled Ohio Impromptu...

...What if there is a playwright, though, and his name is Chekhov...

...Chekhov provides a turning point for the audience, if not for the characters...

...Let it suffice to say I don't understand how Broadway, poor as it is in quality dramas, could pass up this one...

...Only then was it possible to focus on what Dr...

...Serban, however, used the stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater in 1977 to reduce The Cherry Orchard to pararomantic and pseudonaturalistic tatters...

...One needed some time, therefore, to grow accustomed to the distances Chekhov's tormented intellectuals had to cover to meet one another, and to get over a persistent fear that they might miss a step between platforms or fall down a flight of stairs...

...If this were not enough, the balcony overhanging one of the long sides of the rectangle supported a wall of six-foot boards with inner and outer runways that the actors reached via a steep wooden staircase at the far end...

...The property belongs to the girl's father, a pompous, pedantic, utterly self-centered retired professor named Serebryakov...

...yet Serebryakov does back down...

...Astrov will not alter his life either...

...Traditionally, of course, Off Broadway has been associated with what is imperfectly described as "avant-garde...

...The house and garden in this play are more than the scene of the action, they are the catalyst for it...

...I'd like to see some of the La Mama Annex* young customers handing out leaflets in front of the box office condemning the felling of trees for the purpose of allowing an unimaginative director to construct fences against one of the world's greatest playwrights...

...Eight years ago they worked together on the Seagull at the Manhattan Theater Club, too, and there was nothing phony about that effort...

...One line in the text of Uncle Vanya stood out, for it sounded like a reminder by Chekhov to Serban...

...And over the years Ellen Stewart's La Mama Experimental Theater Club on East 4th St., as well as its Annex on the third floor of an unidentified neighboring building, have come to be thought of as most appropriate milieux for would-be theatrical pioneers...

...Astrov, the local physician, had to say to Yel-yena, or Sonya to Vanya...

...Although F. Murray Abraham, in the role of Astrov, was the least Russian-looking member of the cast, he probably came closest to playing his part the way Chekhov envisioned it...

...The child grows up as Parker Richardson Endicott IV (believe me, you don't want to know the reason for the discrepancy in surnames), or Cotty to his friends...

...Instead of a manor and grounds, we got an immense, geometrical, abstract performing space, incongruously garnished with a few very " figurative" objects: a piano in a remote corner...

...Play-housed , a charming theater constructed in what had been a stable and riding academy on far East 91st Street, opened its doors with British playwright Simon Gray's Quartermaine's Terms, directed by Kenneth Frankel and transplanted to New York from New Haven's Long Wharf Theater...

...Though Yelyena has moments when she could reciprocate the doctor's affections, she departs with the professor because she cannot see herself starting on a new course...

...All the "Broadway" theaters were built for the purpose they still serve...

...Naturally he misses, as he misses everything...

...An institutionalized terror apparatus and obsequious henchmen do the job quite adequately...

...A servant couple named Pantry (honest) agrees to let the childless millionaire Botsworth Norvil Bogswater III pass off their baby boy as his own...

...Catastrophe, is the most accessible and consequently the most powerful...

...The middle play...

...It also pretends to introduce a little social satire that actually turns out to be a rather specious defense of social conformism...

...Serebryakov, usually an absentee landlord, has been spending a few weeks at the estate with his wife, the young and beautiful Yelyena...

...The whole structure was then surrounded by wooden stairs, wooden railings, wooden passageways, and wooden fences...

...The final offering, What Where, is even more experimental in form, yet the effort required to follow its drift prove worthwhile...

...Two important Off Broadway productions that started their runs toward the close of last season are still around to help the present one...